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Among the thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study in Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for repression.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.